1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to storage area networks. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method, apparatus, and program for performing boot, maintenance, or install operations on a storage area network.
2. Description of Related Art
A storage area network (SAN) is a network of storage disks. In large enterprises, a SAN connects multiple servers to a centralized pool of disk storage. Compared to managing hundreds of servers, each with their own disks, a SAN improves system administration. By treating all the storage as a single resource, disk maintenance and routine backups are easier to schedule and control. In some SANs, the disks themselves can copy data to other disks for backup without any processing overhead at the host computers.
The SAN network allows data transfers between computers and disks at the same high peripheral channel speeds as when they are directly attached. Fibre Channel is a driving force with SANs and is typically used to encapsulate SCSI commands. Serial strage architecture (SSA) and enterprise system connection (ESCON) channels are also supported. A SAN option that is expected to become popular is IP storage, which enables data transfer via IP over fast Gigabit Ethernet locally or via the Internet to anywhere in the world. IP storage is also referred to as “iSCSI.”
A SAN may include a large number of storage devices. This makes boot, maintenance, and installation operations difficult. For example, a workstation or server may boot from a boot device that is within 40,000 disks on the SAN. Configuring a large number of devices in order to configure a boot device is time consuming and inefficient.
Currently, a boot device is identified in a non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM). Therefore, if a maintenance operation or installation requires the computer to boot from an alternative device, the identified device must be changed in NVRAM. For example, if an install operation is to be performed on a computer, an administrator may need to boot the computer from a removable medium, such as a compact disk (CD). Therefore, the administrator must change the boot disk in the computer to refer to a CD drive on the SAN.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide an improved mechanism for performing boot, maintenance, or install operations on a storage area network.